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Nurse practitioners began practising in the UK in the 1980s. Since then the numbers have grown and a body of research has developed relating to the role. The criticism of nurse practitioners has been that they work as "mini doctors" and that they no longer belong to the family of nursing. If nurse practitioners have more in common with medicine than they do with nursing one might expect to find that nurse practitioners have moved away from the values of nursing and have instead moved toward the values of medicine. To date we know relatively little about the role of the nurse practitioner. The aim of this study was to determine to what extent nurse practitioners share the values of nursing or medicine. In recognition of the author's own role as a nurse practitioner an autoethnographic approach was used. Unstructured interviews were carried out with general practitioners (GPs), nurse practitioners and district nurses and their values were revealed through descriptions of meaningful practice. Significant and important differences were found between the three groups of practitioners both in the form and the content of the narratives. The form of the narratives revealed the cultural connection of the nurse practitioners to nursing. The content of the narratives revealed the pioneering nature of the role and the nurse practitioners' concern with acceptance, recognition and respect. When analysed from a Maclntyrean perspective, the nurse practitioners lacked the purpose and goals that were evident in the descriptions of meaningful practice from the GPs and district nurses. Such a finding seems to be congruent with an emerging practice and challenges the nurse practitioner community to determine for itself the nature of its contribution to patient care.